The new aminoacids might be “essential” (not manufacturable internally) and have to come in as “vitamins” potentially. This is another possible way to prevent gray goo on purpose, but hypothetically it might be possible to find ways to move that synthesis into the genome of neolife itself, if that was cheap and safe. These seem like engineering considerations that could change from project to project.
Mostly I have two fundamental points:
1) Existing life is not necessarily bio-chemically optimal because it currently exists within circumscribed bounds that can be transgressed. Those amino acids are weird and cool and might be helpful for something. Only one amino acid (and not even any of those… just anything) has to work to give “neo-life” some kind of durable competitive advantage over normal life.
2) All designs have to come from somewhere, with the optimization pressure supplied by some source, and it is not safe or wise to rely on random “naturally given” limits in the powers of systems that contain an internal open-ended optimization engine. When trying to do safety engineering, and trying to reconcile inherent safety with the design of something involving autonomous (potentially exponential) growth, either (1) just don’t do it, or else (2) add multiple well-tested purposeful independent default shutdown mechanisms. If you’re “doing it” then look at all your safety mechanisms in a fault tree analysis and if the chance of an error is 1/N then make sure there will definitely not be anything vaguely close to N opportunities for a catastrophe to occur.
The new aminoacids might be “essential” (not manufacturable internally) and have to come in as “vitamins” potentially. This is another possible way to prevent gray goo on purpose, but hypothetically it might be possible to find ways to move that synthesis into the genome of neolife itself, if that was cheap and safe. These seem like engineering considerations that could change from project to project.
Mostly I have two fundamental points:
1) Existing life is not necessarily bio-chemically optimal because it currently exists within circumscribed bounds that can be transgressed. Those amino acids are weird and cool and might be helpful for something. Only one amino acid (and not even any of those… just anything) has to work to give “neo-life” some kind of durable competitive advantage over normal life.
2) All designs have to come from somewhere, with the optimization pressure supplied by some source, and it is not safe or wise to rely on random “naturally given” limits in the powers of systems that contain an internal open-ended optimization engine. When trying to do safety engineering, and trying to reconcile inherent safety with the design of something involving autonomous (potentially exponential) growth, either (1) just don’t do it, or else (2) add multiple well-tested purposeful independent default shutdown mechanisms. If you’re “doing it” then look at all your safety mechanisms in a fault tree analysis and if the chance of an error is 1/N then make sure there will definitely not be anything vaguely close to N opportunities for a catastrophe to occur.